


By Any Other Name

by OzQueen



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Clones, F/M, Identity Issues, Introspection, Lima Syndrome, Pining, Power Imbalance, Stockholm Syndrome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-21
Updated: 2018-10-21
Packaged: 2019-07-25 10:31:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16195739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OzQueen/pseuds/OzQueen
Summary: Maybe there is a seed of something else inside him after all; something other than a dead man's memories.





	By Any Other Name

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lunarium](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lunarium/gifts).



> In an AfterBuzzTV Review in June 2018, Lauren Montgomery said something about Haggar likely having gone through "a few" bugged clones before Operation Kuron's success. 
> 
> I wanted to show Haggar's obsession with recreating Shiro, and what it might be like through the eyes of one of the early (failed) clones.
> 
> This spun way out of control and is nothing like the original idea I had. Lunarium, I sincerely hope you like it, and that there is enough Shiro, and that I have managed to do all of your wonderful likes and tropes and prompts just the tiniest bit of justice. ♥

* * *

 

He has the face and the memories of a dead man.

He calls himself Shiro. He doesn't know what else to do. His memories are full of people turning to him, their faces smiling, worried, fond, grim, excited. All calling him by that name. _Shiro._

It feels natural to him. It drapes itself around him like a cloak of comfort and familiarity. If somebody called to him now, across space, through the walls, _Shiro, can you hear me?_ he would answer, _Yes._

He calls himself Shiro, though he knows that he is not, and that Shiro is dead. He clings to the name which has never truly belonged to him, which has never been spoken aloud to him, which is full and real and loud in his head, a thousand voices overlapping and shouting and laughing, a billion little things that once happened to somebody else.

He looks down at his hand, at the lines and the fingerprints and the scars and imperfections, and wonders how many other hands, how many other bodies and memories have been created — _farmed_ — from the dead man named Shiro.

_Shiro._

And yet, there is one other name. One other name in his head. A name associated with the weight of magic, and the spilling and clotting of blood. He shrinks from it, despite knowing this is what sparked him into existence. This is to what he owes the air in his lungs and the light in his eyes.

_Champion._

She whispers it to him fondly, a dark caress between them.

_My Champion._

 

* * *

 

She takes him to see them. The other Shiros. They are lined up in tubes, staring at him through the glass, unseeing, unthinking. Their expressions do not seem restful to him, but he can't remember being in the cavity of fluid, so he can't be sure it's anything but peaceful. He can only remember waking; the sound of gurgling drains and the raw cold of his first breath of air, and the way his legs had trembled under him when he'd tried to stand.

His first steps.

"You are a failure," she scorns him now, her eyes flashing at him. She is even more derisive and dismissive of him today, here in this room, walled by her creations. Her living monument to the original man with this face and these fingerprints.

 _I woke up tired,_ he thinks.

So tired. So tired, and heavy, and he had never escaped before ( _but he had escaped so many times before_ ), and he was lost ( _but he had been here so many times before_ ), and he was alone ( _but there were so many voices calling his name_ ).

He had fumbled his escape, and now here, at her side, he wonders if he had done it on purpose, just to stay close to her.

He wants her to understand. Deeper, beneath all of it, he wants her to forgive him for not being the real Shiro. For not being the one to have sparked this obsession in her, this purpose.

"Pathetic creature," she says, the words layering themselves over her praise for The Champion.

He follows her from the room and, though they are not yet alive as he is, he can still feel the eyes of the Shiros following him, wondering, judging, pleading.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes Shiro (for he calls himself Shiro) wonders how successful the cloning was.

If he is _all_ Shiro, or if there is something else, bare and original, struggling to grow within him. The flaw which saw his escape from the Galra in ruins, the flaw which drew him back to her. Sometimes he wonders if his personality is his own, and that's why she is disappointed in him. Because he is not what she wanted.

"How do you take someone's memories?" he'd asked her once, and she'd laughed at him.

"You are painfully unimaginative," she had said.

There is one moment which he fiercely lays claim to. He compares it endlessly against his memories, trying to find something to interrupt this fantasy of originality, but he never finds anything, and his heart beats painfully in relief. Because as much as he wants to cling to Shiro and his name, he also wants to be able to point and say to himself, _You see, some of your choices are yours alone._

He was on a cold slab of metal, still trembling and lightheaded from his escape attempt, and she had leaned over him, eyes narrowed, wondering why he had failed. He had reached up to her, knowing somehow that it was she who had brought him into existence.

He had reached up, and he had touched the ends of her silvery hair between his thumb and his forefinger. It was coarse, and dry, and he had stroked it curiously over the pad of his thumb, and she had watched him in surprise.

And now he is still here, alive. And he stubbornly clings to that moment, that small choice to follow a buried impulse simply because he was tired and she was the reason for the air in his lungs and the light in his eyes.

Maybe there is a seed of something else inside him after all; something other than a dead man's memories.

 

* * *

 

He feels the ache in his knees and the weight of his own body tension in his shoulders. He feels the soft stretch of his clothes and the gentle whisper of air cycling through the ship.

And he remembers other sensations, other touches.

Since waking, he's been bruised by the druids, hauling him around and strapping him down. He's been cuffed and chained, pushed and shoved, tugged and tripped.

And he remembers other touches, from before. From a long time ago. Touches on Shiro's skin, soft and gentle — kisses, whispers, soft laughter in his ear. Intimacy.

He remembers all of it, though nobody has touched _his_ skin, no one has kissed _his_ mouth.

He runs his tongue against the inside of his cheek and thinks about warm afternoon kisses and morning kisses and kisses goodbye and kisses hello.

And he remembers other touches too — not so intimate, but pleasant all the same. A clap on the back, a shake of the hand. A nudge of a knee or a thigh when sitting next to someone, a tap on the shoulder, an elbow in the ribs and laughter.

He remembers the electric ice of Galra handcuffs around his wrists, and Haggar's fingers in his hair, dragging and pulling, tilting his head back until he's forced to look up at her. Glaring, defiant.

"Good," she whispers to him, and her hand tightens in his hair and she stares down into his face, watching him, enjoying the force of hatred in his expression.

Shiro (for he calls himself Shiro) listens to the emptiness of the ship humming around him, and he remembers all of it.

 

* * *

 

Dreams and memories mix together.

The bright open space of the arena, gritty sand shifting under his boots, blood drying and tightening on his skin.

Haggar, watching him from the stands, still and silent. A scar of gravity within the endless movement and excitement of the crowd — her hood drawn, her eyes narrowed.

"You will be great," she had promised him, her voice low in his ear, and he had strained against the chains holding him, growling threats at her.

She had only smiled, pleased at the fight within him. "You will be our greatest weapon," she had whispered, and he knows now what she'd meant.

Shiro was a source of power and energy and will. Shiro was tireless, and brave, and good.

He opens his eyes, feeling tired, feeling old, feeling so very brand new.

He is not Shiro, and yet Shiro is all he has.

 

* * *

 

He is allowed to watch her work. She does not seem to think him capable of being a threat, and he is embarrassed to believe she is right.

His memories hold the weight of chains around his wrists and his throat, his aching knees on the hard floor — forced to kneel, forced to bow his head, curses and threats spitting at her with venom.

_I'm going to kill you._

The surge of anger and unfairness threatens to rise within him again sometimes — _we're from a peaceful planet_ — and the breathless punch of despair in his gut, so far from home, so alone, so determined to live just one more day, whatever it costs him. Alien blood dripping from his fingertips, the roar of a crowd in his ears.

He remembers it all. It was him.

It was him, and it was not.

He watches her work — the reason for the light in his eyes and the air in his lungs — and he is quiet, and he kneels on the hard floor willingly, without chains.

 

* * *

 

He remembers doctors, and tests, and prescriptions and alarms.

And he remembers Haggar's curiosity.

"Your body attacks itself," she had whispered, leaning over his strapped chest as he'd tensed in his restraints, aching to kill her. He remembers thinking he could do it with the surgical equipment on the trolley beside him, and he remembers that she had looked at him like she'd known what he was thinking, and her mouth had curled up into a sneer.

She had repaired him like a broken toy and sent him out to play, and when he'd come back from the arena she had rewarded him with a new arm and soft words of praise.

_You will be Champion._

Her pride had been evident; her interest in him growing more and more. She had praised his achievements in the arena and laughed in delight when he'd threatened to kill her too.

He remembers it now as admiration, and he thinks how disappointed she must be now. To have created him from that man — to desire an identical copy of him so dearly, only to find herself with a shell; a ghost of what once was.

 

* * *

 

She won't tell him why she is recreating Shiro. Recreating him over and over and over.

He knows if he were more like Shiro — if he were more like the original — he would be trying to stop her. He would be fighting her and using any free opportunity to destroy the Galra from the inside out, starting with her.

He can't figure out why he isn't. He _is_ Shiro, and everything he remembers from before is hostility and anger.

He glances up at her, watching her through his eyelashes. Rage has burned itself out, if he ever even had it within him to begin with.

Now there is curiosity, and sympathy, and guilt.

Sometimes he thinks he can feel Shiro watching him, and he tries to tell him, _This is my survival now. This is my way of getting from one day to the next. Whatever it takes._

But it feels like a lie and it only adds to the guilt lying heavy and hot in his stomach.

He watches her obsess over the men she has created— the hundreds, thousands of Shiros, demanding perfection and cursing and raging at each failure. If they don't make it out of the ship, she goes to them herself, letting him watch her through the dark pool of energy crackling in the middle of her lab; a phantom magic mirror for the witch.

Sometimes he sees her talking to them, but in the end, there are no second chances. They never live.

Not like him.

He wants to ask why she kept him, but he doesn't dare, in case the answer is a change of mind.

This is not a life — he knows that. He remembers a life lived, and he knows this is not it.

But he looks at the other Shiros and he knows this is better than the incubator. This is better than nothing at all.

 

* * *

 

She doesn't seem to sleep. Sometimes she remembers to take him back to a cell somewhere, guarded, with food and a blanket. Sometimes she forgets, and he falls asleep kneeling on the floor, waking when he starts to fall, his shoulders slumped and his head bowed with exhaustion.

"Do you sleep?" he asks her one day.

"Science does not stop for sleep," she says.

He never thinks of what she does as science. He thinks of it like magic — dark magic, taking someone's memories out of their head and putting it in an empty vessel.

"How long has it been since you slept?" he asks, curious. Worried.

He knows Allura and Coran slept for 10,000 years. Has Haggar been awake with her magic, with the Galra, for so long? Is this what science becomes when you live and breathe it for 10,000 years?

She doesn't answer him. She is impatient for the next clone to wake and stumble from his incubator, ingrained with Shiro's survival instinct, determined to escape. She is watching him through her mirror.

He wakes and staggers from the pod, weaving into the walls, clutching his head. He falls to his knees, and she hisses angrily.

Shiro watches her watching him. He stares into the witch's mirror at the clone, jealous and afraid. A new Shiro. A Shiro closer to the original because, after all, he does not have this length of time — this moment in the lab; this knowledge that his body is that of a dead man; this certainty that he is no threat.

She is trying to recreate her Champion, and each new attempt reminds Shiro (for he calls himself Shiro) that he is a failure. That he is not what she wanted.

He can't help but think she would love him more if he didn't love her quite so much.

 

* * *

 

He can see the Galra underestimate her. They come and go, giving updates, requesting to see Zarkon, arguing with her until they hear a certain note in her voice which causes them to retreat again.

He knows the Galra are losing the war. At least, that's what the updates make it sound like. Maybe he is underestimating her too, and he is only allowed to overhear the updates about the uprising of the rebels because — for reasons he can't understand — that is what she wants him to hear.

He wants the Galra to lose. At every mention of Voltron, his heart jumps, and he feels sick for not being there. He feels sick for abandoning Shiro's Paladins for _this_. His memories stir anew — Keith with him in the training deck, Lance's hopeful smile, the taste of Hunk's cooking, Pidge's glasses sliding down her nose, Allura reaching across the control deck, the warm squeeze of Coran's hand on his shoulder.

He hangs his head and he weeps because he lost them, and they're looking for him, and when they finally find him it won't be _him_. They will find Haggar's new Champion, and maybe it will work at first, but then that seed inside — that weed forcing its way up through all the carefully planted memories — that weed will grow and, within her final success, within the Champion, it will be a worse impulse than simply reaching up to touch a lock of silvery hair.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes she turns from her work and is surprised to find him kneeling on her floor. It is like she has forgotten him altogether, and somehow that is a worse fate than what had been planned for him. To be forgotten.

"Why must you look at me like that?" she asks him one day.

He is surprised, because she never offers the start of a conversation to him, and because she sounds tired, and it is a weakness she has not shown him before.

"Like what?" he asks.

She stands in front of him, and he wonders if she wants him to get to his feet. She touches the top of his head and rubs her thumb up and down over his ear, through his short hair.

 _Like a dog,_ Shiro thinks, and a shiver rocks him.

"You like it," she murmurs.

He shakes his head.

"You do." She grazes her nails over his scalp and he shivers again and tilts his head. He has been kneeling for a long time, and he's hungry, and tired, and she has ignored him for so long.

"Why have I not killed you?" she asks quietly. "You are a failed experiment. I should burn you up."

His throat aches with all he wants to say. _I still have value. I am a human being. I am from a peaceful planet. Let me go home. Let me go to my friends. Let me go…_

"He'll kill you," he says instead. "When you finally make your Champion, he'll kill you."

"You silly creature," she says, and he wants to believe there is a note of fondness in her voice. Her fingers slide through his hair, her nails draw over his scalp.

"Stop making them," he says. He leans his head into her robes. Her body is thin and heard beneath, and he presses his cheek against her thigh, hating himself, hating the judgement of the people he knows but has never met, as their hatred for her rises in his memories.

"Jealous," she concludes, tracing a touch around the back of his ear. "What a petty weakness. Your failure goes deeper than I thought."

He closes his eyes and tries to stop the protesting voices in his head. He has not gone back to Voltron; he has not fought a war for anyone but himself. This is his survival.

"I should burn you up," she says again, still stroking his hair, still talking to him like perhaps he doesn't quite understand her words. "I have no use for you."

He knows she could kill him. He thinks she probably will, eventually. Because she is right — he offers nothing. He woke with his fires already burned out, the fight within him already fought and lost. At some point, after everything, Shiro let his guard down, and this is the result of it. He is a surviving mistake, a glitch who survived merely by chance.

(Her hair between his fingers, coarse and rough, shining in the purple light.)

"You should kill me," he agrees, whispering into the darkness of her cloak.

"Yes." She strokes his hair again.

He waits, but it doesn't come. No quick movement, no bolt of energy or light. After another moment, she pushes him lightly away, and turns her back on him, returning to her work, the soft mutter of her voice ebbing and flowing over him like a spell of its own.

He watches her, held in place with shame instead of chains.

 

* * *

 

"Why haven't you kept any of the others?" he asks one day, adrenaline singing in his veins. Half of him hopes she will answer him; the other half of him hopes she will punish him with fury, and this cursed shadow existence will end.

"How do you know I have not?"

It cuts through him like ice. All the Shiros in their incubators; all the Shiros he has watched die at her hand; all the Shiros he has watched disappear into the darkness of space; their sparks fluttering and dying out in the emptiness they'd fled to.

Each time she has turned back to her work, trying to find the flaw in her plan, he has assumed it's because that Shiro has also failed, and is now dead.

"Why would you keep more than one failed experiment?" he asks.

"Why would I keep one at all?" Her voice is a low growl, and it sends sweat crawling down his spine. He tells himself he doesn't care if she kills him. He is nothing to no one here.

"Maybe there's value in me somewhere," he says. "There must be."

"Must there?" She turns to look at him, half-interested. "What value should I see in you? You, kneeling there, desperate for approval, hm? Is it because you remember your glory days? Those magnificent battles in the Black Lion, freeing those trapped for thousands of years under the Galra's rule. Or perhaps your days in the arena?" She cups his chin roughly, forcing his head back to look at her.

"What are you remembering?" she asks, laughing at him with savage pleasure. "Why are you trying to fool yourself now? Those memories mean nothing. Your entire existence has been passive, and I am bored with you."

"I remind you of him," he says softly, and he sees the flash of anger in her eyes.

"You are nothing like him," she says. She drops his chin with a rough jerk, her nails scratching welts into his skin.

"But you still keep me," he says. The welts are smarting; his face feels hot. "You wanted him here like this — kneeling for you, admiring you. Grateful for repairing him."

"Gratitude is weakness," she says. "You are more fool than I thought."

"You wanted me to love you," Shiro says, for he calls himself Shiro, and he feels the name swell and warm in his chest, and he straightens his back and looks up at her with absolute certainty. "You made me whole — you gave me an arm and you gave me glory, and you wanted me to see your cleverness and your vision, but all I saw was your cruelty. And I should have killed you when I had the chance."

She gives him a small, careful smile. She steps a little closer to him. "The chance is yours for the taking," she says quietly. "What is stopping you now?"

He remembers the rows and rows of faces, and he feels his head full of a dead man's memories, and he remembers the rough touch of her hair between his fingers.

"Ah," she laughs. "You have seen my vision now, perhaps? You have seen my cleverness? Is it easier to forget cruelty when one is so curious about such things? Easy to forget suffering, when creation is at one's fingertips." She cups his face in her hands and leans down. "It is so easy," she says.

His mouth is dry.

"I see now why I kept you," she whispers, her thumb running over his cheek. "Look at you, abandoning your virtues and beliefs, though you were born with them so fully formed. Look at you, so easily abandoning your friends. Look at you, sitting here until you fall with exhaustion. Watching me. Waiting for me to succeed." Her fingers are cold on his skin.

He wants to curl into himself. The name Shiro is a darkness in his chest and on his tongue; the taste of guilt and regret is in his mouth.

"You have in you what he fought so hard against," she says, her eyes glowing at him. "You do not rebel against your admiration for me."

"I do," he snarls, suddenly angry, and guilty, and hurt. 

Her laugh is soft. "You are so curious," she whispers. "That is what I loved about you — your desire to travel into the unknown and find the answers none had found before. So ambitious." Her fingers card gently through his hair and he feels his anger slip away from him traitorously, leaving him only with longing.

He closes his eyes. "My name is Shiro," he whispers, though he isn't sure he can bear to call himself that ever again.

"Yes," she says, stroking his cheek. "That's what you all say. Every single one of you."

 

* * *

 


End file.
